Zenit Miniatures

For now I finished my Ii clan warband. I added 6 Perry Ashigaru and 2 monks (Kensei and GTStudio) Since I mostly use them for IHMN and Daisho these got me now a formidable skirmish force. Daisho is a skirmish game set in feudal Japan (which even could include mystical creatures and such) based on the IHMN ruleset.

We are playing a lot of In Her Majesty´s Name games lately and I tried the Samurai list for the first time a few weeks ago. Since that I´m expanding my collection of Ii clan Samurai to use them either there or for Ronin.

Tabletop games can be a rather nasty business, because at some point you will have a lot of unfinished projects, and find yourself sitting between too much unpainted stuff. I hope I’m not the only one with that problem ;). To tackle this, I started to finish off some companies of several wargames, still standing unpainted on my table.

The start made these two samurai archers, which will go into my Ronin Bushi warband. They are Zenit Miniatures Yumi Samurai and are really nicely sculpted. A bit fiddly to put together and clean, since you don’t want to remove any details with the mold lines. They turned out really well though. I themed most of my samurai with red armors as retainers of Li Naotaka. Since I field a samurai only warband (no Ashigary at all), I wanted some ranged weapons to support my close combat specialist. I painted some japanese symbols on the Sashimonos belonging to the Li family. Historical correctnes was not my main focus here, since I just wanted to get a nice overall look.

Zenit Miniatures did a very good job on their Samurai range in my opinion. Some of the best sculpts available at the moment. The have really nice details and offer a big range of models to choose from.

They fit quiet well in my Samurai warband, already consisting of one Zenit Samurai, two Perry Miniatures Samurai and one Kingsford sculpt. The warband consists of a Boushu (the Samurai leader with the white hair on his helmet), a Hatamoto Samurai (a higher ranked samurai, with the white jinbaori over his armor), two samurai with katanas and now two samurai with yumi bows.

In Ronin, they form a 200 pt warband wich seems to be outnumbered everytime, but hits quiet hard, with no model below rank 3. It’s not that I don’t like Ashigaru, I just prefer the cool looking armors of the Samurai :). I don’t have much experience with playing Ronin (I played just a few 100 pt games until now), but I like the idea of a small elite force. We’ll see how they perform against some other warbands. Hopefully I can make a test game with this lineup soon to post an after action report.